Poor sales may have RIM gearing up for PlayBook fire sale

RIM has slashed prices on the PlayBook for employees of a Canadian carrier, …

Research in Motion may be preparing to slash prices on its BlackBerry PlayBook in the near future: the 16GB model is being sold at half-price to employees of the cell carrier Rogers in Canada, according to Boy Genius Report. RIM acknowledged it would begin cutting prices during its earnings call yesterday, though specifics on deals for consumers have yet to be revealed.

The 7-inch PlayBook was not well-received upon its launch in April, when it was priced starting at $499 for a 16GB WiFi-only model. Since then, Sprint canceled plans to carry a 4G version of the PlayBook, and RIM announced during its earnings call Thursday that fewer than 200,000 units have shipped in the last three months—about the same as the HP TouchPad before its everything-must-go $99 sale.

RIM noted during the call that it plans to drop the price of PlayBook to motivate sales, and the cuts have already trickled out to employees of Rogers. The workers can get their hands on the 16GB model for CAN$249, up to the largest 64GB model for CAN$399.

The company hasn’t said for sure that those prices will cross over to consumers, and it's still expressing some confidence that the next version of the tablet’s QNX-based operating system will spur consumer interest (as might the inclusion of native e-mail and calendar apps). RIM plans to announce a trajectory for the PlayBook as well as QNX-based BlackBerry smartphones at DevCon in October. But we'd keep half an eye on the flash-sale sites, just in case there's another tablet mad dash.

7 inch... not interested. If it was like the TP size then yeah...!Would be interesting to see if they sellout the way the TP did if they slash that low... would be a major blow if it lasts for a week or more with a firesale of $99

The current iteration of the PlayBook may have missed the market, but I don't see how RIM could continue to exist without figuring out how to make tablets work. There's going to be no such thing as a phone-only OS.

I still don't understand how they thought it was a good idea to ship before having native e-mail and calendar clients ready. This effectively limited their market to people that already have Blackberries, and even if you have a Blackberry, pairing it to use e-mail and calendars probably wasn't the best user experience (I think you had to install a separate app first). I wonder how many returns there were because people brought it home and found out they had to pair it with their Blackberry or use web apps for e-mail and calendars.

I've never used a Playbook, so maybe it wasn't so bad in practice. But I'm sure the negative buzz it caused hurt sales and the Playbook's reputation.

The current iteration of the PlayBook may have missed the market, but I don't see how RIM could continue to exist without figuring out how to make tablets work. There's going to be no such thing as a phone-only OS.

Agreed. Though I'm wary of the suggestion that RIM will figure it out, because otherwise they're gone. I would say it's more like "RIM will go bankrupt / be acquired for pennies because they won't figure it out." Even if they opened a magic portal to clueland this afternoon, it's probably too late.

I still don't understand how they thought it was a good idea to ship before having native e-mail and calendar clients ready.

Sheer arrogance. You can imagine the meeting where they decided that shipping the tablet without email or calendar was brilliant because everyone would want the tablet, and it would push people to switch to RIM phones. "What could possibly go wrong?"

Meanwhile, the Android tablets that are currently for sale have to compete against both HP's and RIM's fire-sale prices, and some of those are already on shaky ground. So who's next? The latter half of 2011 will be known as the Great Tablet Crash by the time the dust settles.

Blackberry is effectively dying a not so slow death in the smartphone/tablet sector. The market knows it, consumers know it, I'm sure even the top level management know it, but unlike HP they can't just drop it and move on. It's not exactly a small part of their overall business plan. Hopefully there aren't too many who bought long at the beginning of the year when the price was hovering around the $70 mark.

I still don't understand how they thought it was a good idea to ship before having native e-mail and calendar clients ready.

Sheer arrogance. You can imagine the meeting where they decided that shipping the tablet without email or calendar was brilliant because everyone would want the tablet, and it would push people to switch to RIM phones. "What could possibly go wrong?"

You mean you didn't rush out to buy a BB phone so you could use a PlayBook? They may have trouble even selling them at US$100 for the same reason. Come on, get your 7" discontinued PlayBook without email or calendar (unless you have a recent BB phone already), for only $100, the same price as the larger HP TouchPad that includes those features. In it's favor, it's lighter, has a 3MP camera, and HDMI out. At US$100 they might clear out pretty quickly, at $150 or more, they're won't be a big rush to buy them.

I don't necessarily see this as a move dictated by RIM's performance, instead I think this is a sign that the tablet market is coming off whatever crazy drugs it was on. I mean why are all size tablets (of similar capability and build quality) sold for the same $$$? Smaller ones should cost less than larger ones, should they not? We (as consumers) don't want the guys who sell bigger tables to raise prices, so what we need is for the guys who sell smaller ones to lower them. It had to happen eventually, after the money grab by all the companies.

RIM seems to be acting in a reasonable and progressive fashion, for once. I think this is a good thing for everyone involved (except those corps late to the party who still wanted to grab some money).

Running android apps is all that could save RIM. It is in the works, but timing is everything.

It would not have saved RIM. Another article somewhere observed that would result in a PlayBook that ran its own apps natively, Android apps in a different way, and overall creating a fragmented user experience that could end up being inconsistent enough to annoy the vast consumer market that prefers a highly integrated, seamless experience. Consumers might have found the "feature" of running Android apps to be a selling point that looked good on the spec sheet, and then later might have discovered it to be less than desirable in practice, where you have to expect a different UI and adjust your interaction based on what kind of app you have open.

It might have turned out to be another example of trying to sell a product assuming that the numbers on the spec sheet are all that counts, like those Android tablets that have CPUs that are faster than the iPad on paper, but where the iPad ends up out-benchmarking them in practice due to the overall system design.

I just hope RIM doesn't go the spineless HP way and self-destructs in a shareholder pleasing implosion. (perhaps selling its assets and killing the rest) Sometimes companies come back from the dead (Apple anyone) and Microsoft has shown that a bad first version doesn't mean that you cannot succeed in the end (SQL Server, XBOX)

And they still have a lot going for them and are actually growing pretty fast. Just much slower than the smartphone market, but who cares they just would need to really lock in their enterprise niche.

To be clear, they shipped 200,000 this quarter in addition to the 500,000 they shipped last quarter. Still would be nice to see how many they actually sold, but Ars really seems to be laying on the RIM hate lately. I don't need them to be huge BB fanboys (that's what Crackberry is for) but it'd be nice to not see them distorting the facts like this.

To be clear, they shipped 200,000 this quarter in addition to the 500,000 they shipped last quarter. Still would be nice to see how many they actually sold, but Ars really seems to be laying on the RIM hate lately. I don't need them to be huge BB fanboys (that's what Crackberry is for) but it'd be nice to not see them distorting the facts like this.

its not ars, its their results. they didn't meet their own estimates this quarter.gross margin declined, they are making less money. i wouldnt blame the stock falling on Ars either.

To be clear, they shipped 200,000 this quarter in addition to the 500,000 they shipped last quarter. Still would be nice to see how many they actually sold, but Ars really seems to be laying on the RIM hate lately. I don't need them to be huge BB fanboys (that's what Crackberry is for) but it'd be nice to not see them distorting the facts like this.

its not ars, its their results. they didn't meet their own estimates this quarter.gross margin declined, they are making less money. i wouldnt blame the stock falling on Ars either.

I think he was merely pointing out that one can get the impression, as several previous posters seem to, that it didnt just ship 200K, its shipped a total of 700K.

I think he was merely pointing out that one can get the impression, as several previous posters seem to, that it didnt just ship 200K, its shipped a total of 700K.

This. Somehow the whole internet seems to talk RIM to death. Sometimes I wonder if this is a self-fullfilling prophesy, I know a couple people who didn't get a Blackberry because they are afraid that RIM dies and they loose support, apps etc.

If it weren't for the constant eulogies they wouldn't stand sooo bad. 700k shipped devices is not bad compared to most consumer electronics, why should they need to compare to the once in a lifetime runaway success that is the iPad? Its definitely more than webOs Pads, and I seem to remember that its also more than what Samsung sold in Galaxy pads.

And for their phones? They sold significantly more than last year. Sure there are more Androids and iPhones but a smaller slice of a bigger pie can still be a bigger slice. They just need to focus and don't do stupid things like releasing the Playbook without email or new phones without enterprise email support. The last thing would be really really really stupid